Soft Spot

Comments are most welcome. Thank you.

An apt title! I love the detail.

Wonderful composition, rhythm. The tonal range seems a bit shallow, but that's just my taste. It's a wonderful image.

Alex: very nice shot, it does have good contrast, but maybe could use a little more exposure. But if the walls and steps are actually that bleached and white, the exposure may be bang on. Increasing the exposure (decreasing brightness I guess in PS) might give it more pop. Regardless great composition...nice portfolio also...Dave

I love the way the staircase takes your eyes all the way across the picture. The cat is a great variable, too. Great composition.

Great curves again Alex, and compostionally wonderful. Your model is posing beautifully too! :)

This is great! The cat is perfect here!

Oh, that's lovely! When I see something like that, I cannot help myself not to try to carress her or at least approach her. She looks like shes knows you are taking a pic of her, but let you have the honor :)

Cheers, S.

Alexandre, this is great stuff. I think you have really matured with your photography. It is obvious that you take careful consideration when you compose your shots. This is a perfect example of a great composition. The tonal range is superb. My hats off to you my friend.

Another fine composition, Alexandre. The lines here are beautiful, the parallel arcs of the stairs and handrail drawing the eye in and contrasting with the rectangles in the wall and street. Two critical remarks: The cat is wonderful, of course, but it'd be even better if its eyes were open. (Obviously this isn't something you can control.) Also, I suggest tweaking the B&W conversion a bit to try to capture more texture, or local contrast, in the brightest parts of the wall and stairs. Something's not quite right about the B&W here. You have the right tonal range, but insufficient tone separation within that range. Notice how there are mainly just three tones here, near-white, middle gray, and black. (I am being a nit-picking perfectionist, but the quality of your work demands such high standards.)

Very well seen. I will suggest a croping of a little strip on the right, in order to place the cat on the right third and to make two equal parts with the wall on the right and the stairs on the left.

Good photo!

Lots of interesting graphic detail and textures with a good range of B&W tones, the kitty ads a nice compositional story line to this image. I like the way my eyes are led through the photo, it was a nice journey.

Thanks a lot everyone for commenting, I truly appreciate all your views. It is very curious that your opinions about the b&w tones vary so much, from very good to bad... The truth is that I can't pronounce myself accurately about it as I can only use my (crappy) laptop screen to edit my photos and I can't really trust it.

 

I've read something about only DSLR being able to capture 16 bit images, thus my camera not being one, perhaps can only produce 8 bit. That gives just 256 grey tones to work with, in opposing to some thousands with 16 bit. Anyone please could confirm me this, or don't I have a clue about what I'm talking about??...

Alexandre, this is one of my favourite photos I've seen lately. I love the composition, with so many interesting contrasting scales of texture and straight/curved lines, and the cat of course is just wonderful. I like it as is, but I had a look at bringing out more detail in the highlights in PS and am attaching for comparison. I think there's plenty of information there if you choose to bring it out. But it also works just fine the way you have it. My personal preference may be somewhere in between.

Alexandre, Julie's right that even in 8-bit you can squeeze finer tone separation from digital B&W. It's mainly a matter of learning how to use the different data in the three separate channels, R, G, and B. Good digital B&W is not easy, and most of us are still learning how to control it reliably. Another way to get finer tonality is by using a duotone.

Excellent composition, excellent originality! Wonderful work Alexandre! Julie has a very good version too! Kind regards!

About the 16 or 8 bits, I am not an expert in this sujbject but it seems to me that 16 bits are useful only for colour images. For black and white, 8 bit and 256 levels of grey are plenty sufficient.

Regards, and thank you if you can take a look on my recent uploads.

One more time, it's a very well composed shot! Exposure looks fine for me, I find Julie's one a little bit overdone.

Julie, I agree with you that it should be something in between. Your version made me realize that in fact there is lots of detail looking flat on my posted version. Did you use curves on those areas? I'll certainly give it a try later. Thank you very much!

 

Chris, your duotone suggestion sounds like a good possibility. You're right about good digital b&w not being easy; I always spend a great deal of time playing with the channel mixer until getting satisfied, even though that doesn't always happen...

 

Alin, thanks for viewing and commenting.

 

Henri, thanks for the techs. Will be my pleasure to have a look at them.

 

Yann, I'm glad you like it. Cheers!

 

Again an example of your great eye for detail and composition Alex! I love your crop and your 'soft' version. Even the cat purrs of enjoyment. Beautiful streetscene with the radiation af a still life. Greetz, Ada:~)

Thank you very much Ada for your nice words. Greetings